Josh Marshall is your fiancee?

Congratulations!

Thanks for the interesting list. I must complain about your first entry, the only one I know much of.

"she's made being sophisticated and liberal a good thing"

Maddow's show is awful. The first few weeks I enjoyed her shows but the allure wore off fast. She might be an intellectual of some kind, and clearly is intelligent and educated, but what she presents on her MSNBC show has become godawful. I do check in occasionally in case it was a bad week (then months), and so far so icky. She's made being an intellectual liberal a matter of trite smarmy and snarky cliches and awful posturing.

Given that I don't know the rest of your list, my expectations have been properly lowered, if that's how you meant "Might as well get the obvious out of the way."

Huh. well this is sort of weird - I guess I'm the *other* Steve Katz (the MoJo one) who reads TPM...

Anyway - I have no idea if he's under 40 or not, but I'd add Zack Exley to your list. His "Revolution in Jesusland" opened an amazing window into the changes happening w/in the evangelical community - and helped me understand what's happening as a new generation of leadership comes up...

Happy New Year you guys!

Andrew -- what is the point of placing top 10-style "list journalism," one of the more hackneyed features of mainstream media, in TPM? List journalism is lowest-common-denominator stuff, designed to seduce you to buy Time or Vanity Fair (which otherwise are _occasionally_ decent publications.)

Is a list worthy because these people need more publicity? Hardly. They're already far more well-known than their peers (w/ possible exception of Danah Boyd.) Is it to "celebrit-ize" a younger generation of political commentators, when the celebritization of previous generations of writers/commentators is directly related to their mediocrity (aka Woodward, Hitchens, et al)? I'm sure that's not your intention, but frankly I don't want a new group of anointed ones from my demographic.

It also strikes me as contrary to the style of the web, in which commentary is less hierarchical. Of course some writers/activists are more creative or insightful than others, and I, too, look for their take on events. But why reify this stuff?

Nothing against being witty and entertaining, but as you may have noticed America has some real problems ahead that are going to make the last few decades of the 20th century seem like a golden age of carefree prosperity by comparison. With the exception of the health care guru prof, it does not appear from the summaries provided that these folks are actually working on tangible approaches to dealing with the concrete and monumental challenges ahead for our country: end of cheap fossil fuels, the manifold catastrophes of climate change and environmental overshoot, and the disease, poverty, failed states, weapons proliferation internationally compounded by eight years of asinine blundering from the White House, etc. etc.

I don't know if he belongs in the Top Ten, but the brilliant Nate Silver at 538.com deserves a mention. He is known for his laser-like number crunching and poll analysis, but I think his work has bigger implications for the future of the progressive agenda. If I was a conservative I'd be scared shitless that the other team has someone as smart as Nate.

And I take issue with the comments of "Ramp" above. Given that it's the beginning of the New Year, Andrew Golis does us a favor by showcasing the great young talent out there. Thanks, Andrew....

If we expand beyond progressive reformers to include lefties, I would put Naomi Klein at the top of any list. I would add Nomi Prins who called the economic bad boys out in 2004 with her book "Other People's Money". She worked at Bears Stearns and Goldman Sachs and walked away saying that she knew what it took to be successful in these places and she didn't want to go there. I'd add muckraker David Sirota and the incredible Glenn Greenwald who could be our next Bill Moyers, but maybe they all just turned 41?

ELIZABETH WARREN!!!!!!

Come on, she rocks

This strikes me as a somewhat narrow and wonky list of intellectuals, although there are certainly interesting people on the list.

For one thing, they are all Americans. I find it disappointing that the rising generation of Americans, even those educated at some of our top institutions of higher learning, appears to remain quite provincial and chauvinistic in its social outlook. Are the visions of young people in America really so bound up with their own country that whether or not they feel hopeful about the future is determined entirely by their perception of the American scene?

The emerging progressive future is a global phenomenon, and the individual citizenries of single powerful countries are decreasingly relevant as determiners of the global destiny. For people who profess such pride in their technological savvy and social networking abilities, it is quite strange to find that intellectual networks among younger Americans remain so local and non-globalized.

My hope for the next decade is that the spread of social networking technologies catalyzes broad transnational communication, including intellectual and artistic activity, and makes it increasingly possible for Americans to emerge from their limited cultural enclaves, and both identify with social, political and cultural movements and parties that extend beyond their shores, and work coherently with the participants in these global movements.

My guess is that just as the "blogosphere" emerged very rapidly and has spurred an enormous cultural dislocation that is displacing the older, centralized media culture, we will in the next several years see the rapid emergence of a highly networked, transnational, polyglot "globosphere" that will make the current blogospheric forms and cultural attitudes seem just as dated and doomed as the old media culture seems to us today.

Hacker's health care plan is the opposite of progressive. It took the idea of forced subsidization of the for profit health insurance companies which came from the center right and re-packaged it as mainstream center-left. This is a true disaster since this policy will not be able achieve universal health care that is also comprehensive, and controls costs, and subsidizes a terribel system that exist nowhere else in the world (reliance of private for profit health insurtance companies), because the underlying assumptions are false.

For real intellectual academic progressive health serivces/policy research check out the work Dr. Steffie Woolhandler and Dr. David Himmelstein, life and professional partrners who are associate professors of medicine at Harvard Medical
School and primary care physicians, teachers, and reseachers in support of single payer; see:

http://scholar.google.com/scholar?num=100&hl=en&lr=&q=%22David+Himmelstein%22+OR+%22Steffie+Woolhandler+%22&btnG=Search

Am I the only one that finds Rick Perlstein's books exasperating? I've read Before the Storm and made foray's into Nixon...he has this sort of weird "breezy" style which I'm sure others may find charming and witty, but which I can't stand. Plus, at least in the case of Nixon, it wasn't clear to me that much serious scholarship ahd gone into the work. I've only made it through the first little bit, but it seemed to mostly be summaries of secondary sources, spiced up with Perlstein's personal commentary / "wit".

I'm surprised you left out Andrea Batista Schlesinger and the whole Drum Major Institute crew.

I would agree with Naomi Klein as well as David Sirota. And I think Nate Silver's been doing a great job, too!

hi - another good addition to your list would be Steve Rockwell and his colleagues at CrossLeft (www.crossleft.org)and the Institute for Progressive Christianity (www.instituteforprogressivechristianity.org). If they're getting blasted by Rush Limbaugh, they must be on to something.